👐🏼 How to teach your kids about giving.
In a particularly trying year, many of us are still more fortunate than most. How to instill a giving mindset in your kids from an early age.
👋 Intro
In the bustle of gifts and Elf on the Shelfs and treat-fuelled merriment, it can be tricky to bring the holiday message back to themes of giving, especially for young kids. Today we turn to how to teach and sustain an orientation towards giving and generosity.
🤓 Giving 101
🥰 Make it personal: Connect your family’s giving to things that tie to your family values. This’ll make it easier for your family to find unique and sustainable ways to help (eg. food (donate to local food bank/share a cooked meal with a neighbor), elderly (sing carols via video for a nearby nursing home or draw a picture for a neighbor), new families in the community (drop off a “welcome basket” or drop off a “things to know about our neighborhood”) or pets (drop-off pet food at a local animal shelter) etc)
💌 Make it regular, not a major event: Starting when the kids are young, find small ways to make it routine and not just at holiday time. But the holidays are a great time to start. The key is to make it a part of your family’s everyday life.
💰Not all about money: While donations are what first comes to mind, giving doesn’t have to be about money. It can be letters, food, gifts or acts of kindness in your community. Teaching giving is more about creating a mindset towards generosity than anything else.
🕺 Make it fun and do it together: Like anything with kids, make it an adventure. Get them involved in choosing who the recipient is and what you’ll be giving. Set aside a day a month or quarter to make it a family thing.
💕 Role model generosity: It’s hard for kids to see your donation to charities or you’re probably donating cherished old toys under the cover of secrecy lest they plead to keep them all so it can be hard for your kids to see your generosity/giving in action. Find ways, from talking about everyday ways you all did “a kind thing” to setting aside a portion of every monetary gift to give to something of their choice.
✨ The Options
Here are just 3 options to try out:
💰 Give. Save. Spend. Whether with an app, a piggy bank (like this or this) or with simple jars, create the mindset towards taking any amount of money and splitting it up in 3 buckets - one to give, one to save and one to spend. Have the kids choose where they might want the give amounts to go to (eg. donate the cash, use the cash to buy something to make/give etc). There are lists of great organizations to give to below.
💌 Write letters. A kindness in these times of isolation is simply to write notes. To family members, to neighbors, to healthcare and frontline workers. To make it fun, you can design/print or buy fun stationary or cards. Create a bin with all the writing materials that can be pulled out on the weekends or in the evening while making dinner (stickers are an automatically enthusiasm builder). Include stamps and teach the kids about writing/mailing letters. For local ones, drop them off for neighbors or the next time you pick up groceries.
For added help, consider printing out these postcards and leaving them with elderly neighbors or other home that might need extra help.🧸 Quarterly clothes and toys donations. This is probably one of the hardest things to do with kids (get them to part with things they haven’t seen for 6 months but now are vital to their existence), but it’s also one of the more impactful and personal ways to get the giving mindset going. Set aside a day a quarter where everyone in the family parts with gently used clothes, toys and goods you no longer need. Ideally, give some to a family you might know or is in your community. But otherwise find ways to connect the giving to the impact in another family’s life.
🧰 The Tools
🎅🏻 USPS Operation Santa - “Intercept” a letter to Santa from kids and fulfill it anonymously to make a family’s Christmas.
🥰 Help people impacted by the pandemic by finding the organization you want to support.
A Kid’s Guide to Giving - check out a guide written by a teen.
🧐 Worth reading/watching
Giving, the best gift of all - goes into more details about how to introduce giving to your kids